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28 Aug 2015

The new buzz words – GMP & MGM

You will be getting to grips with what GMP – good management practice – has been described as. And how doing GMP is part of the MGM – matrix of good management. For a very few star performers none of this will be new, but for lots of farmers there will be parts of doing GMP that will require some changed ways of doing common farm activities.

Do a quick search on “how long to change a habit” and Google’s consensus seems to be 21 days – although there are a few suggesting it’s more like 60 days. For anyone that has tried to change a habit you will know that even 60 days is not long really – it takes a long time before a new way of doing things seems natural.
So when you are thinking about making the changes required to meet the GMP & MGM requirements, be realistic that it will take some concerted effort over a period of time. This is not suggesting an out for not getting started – it is a suggesting that to make progress means fighting our own nature, which is to put a lot of reliance on what we have always done. Below is a link to an interesting article published a couple of years ago which suggest that even with access to data we make decisions that are overly influenced by our past behaviours. So to really change and improve how we do things, we have to push past that and create new behaviours:

“The rapid democratization of data and computing power easily brings boat-loads of information right to your cell phone. New filtration systems allow us to zero in on the important bits of information and pull precise bits from petabytes. Where we still fall flat on our faces, however, is getting past our own brains, and our own biases, in order to make better decisions.”http://mcateeonmedia.com/2013/05/the-nth-dimension/